Rip Torn and Matthew McConaughey Join Bernie

Rip Torn is returning to the big screen in the Jack Black led comedy, Bernie. According to THR, he’ll be joined by Matthew McConaughey and Oscar winner Shirley MacLaine in the Richard Linklater directed film. This will be a reunion of sorts for McConaughey, who appeared in Linklater’s classic Dazed and Confused.

The plot for Bernie sounds like a present day remake of Weekend at Bernie’s, which might explain it’s coincidental name. It centers on “a Renaissance man-community leader-mortician Bernie (Black) who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a wealthy but very particular widow. When he kills her, he goes to great lengths to maintain the illusion that she is still alive.”

In the film, Torn will play Bernie’s defense lawyer and McConaughey will star as the town’s district attorney, who’s angling for re-election and suspicious about the widow’s death. We wonder if he’ll have flashbacks of his stint from A Time to Kill? Remember when he used to do really good drama?

On a side note, Bernie is based on a true story. A mortician really did get convicted of killing an elderly woman back in 1996 and pretending she was still alive months after. Creepy.

What do you think of the cast of Bernie? Are you interested in seeing the film?